1971 – Half Way
In February 1971, Carole King released Tapestry, an album with 12 songs. There are lots of statistics about the commercial success of this collection. It is the 81st best-selling album of all time, with over 14 million sales certified worldwide. It received four Grammy awards in 1972, including Album of the Year. In 2020, Tapestry was ranked number 25 on Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time. Carole King wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on the album, two of which had already been hits for other artists. It was number one on the Billboard 200 for 15 consecutive weeks, a record for most non-consecutive weeks at number one by a female solo artist for over 20 years, until surpassed by Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard (with 20 weeks at number one), and it still holds the record for most consecutive weeks at number one by a female solo artist. In terms of time on the charts, it ranks fifth overall,[24] and in terms of length on the charts for solo musical acts it ranks second.
Robert Christgau put it well in 1972 when he commented: “Carole King’s Tapestry is a triumph of mass culture. In less than two years it has sold well over five million copies, putting it in a class with the best-selling albums of all time, and it is still on the charts … Such statistics are so overwhelming that they seem to transform a mere record into some sort of ineluctable cultural presence, and in a sense they do.” [i] If you were young at the time it was released (I was 26 years old), it was one of the voices of our generation.
The penultimate song, Tapestry, was evocative, mystical, full of longing, a paean to hope and opportunity, and a presentiment of death. Christgau was prescient: it was at the core of the Baby Boomer culture, but it was essentially wistful, as if whatever we might have been hoped for would never eventuate, all expressed in that sudden, unexpected final line of the first verse:
My life has been a tapestry
Of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision
Of the ever-changing view
A wond’rous woven magic
In bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see
Impossible to hold
Did we know then how much would change? This was the year in which two events heralded an ever-changing view, woven into the fabric of society, and yet, as the song goes on to warn us “my tapestry’s unravelling, and he’s come to take me back”. Two events changed what we knew and expected, and two events began with promise and ended in muddles and disaster.
In the US, 1971 was the year of the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers reported on the political and military involvement of the United States in Vietnam. It was commissioned in 1967 by Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time. The report covered US-Vietnam involvement from World War II to 1968. Daniel Ellsberg, a government consultant, had access to some of the classified documents and leaked them to the New York Times in June 1971.
The material revealed several large scale attacks that had been hidden from the US public, causing many to lose trust in the government. The general feeling was that the government had misled the public and withheld the truth. The information in the documents also added to the already growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War, increasing existing anti-war sentiment. Apart from public morale, there were many other reasons the US agreed to a cease-fire and began the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam in 1973, finally departing with the fall of Saigon in 1975. These included low morale among the troops, and an oil crisis leading to major cost increases, both of which added to the growing domestic concerns. Americans had been horrified by news of the My Lai massacre, back in 1968, and Ellsberg’s illegal release of the Pentagon papers gave a further blow to any lingering support for a ‘distant’ war.
Ellsberg’s role is well-known. He had worked on the Vietnam study for several months in 1967, and given access to the work at RAND in 1969. Opposing the war that year, Ellsberg and a friend photocopied the study in October 1969. In February 1971, he provided an outline of the key issues to Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter, and gave him 43 volumes (but not all the material). Seeking legal protection, the NYT was advised, by their in-house counsel that, under the First Amendment (usually referred to as the free speech amendment), the press had a right to publish information important to understanding government policy.
The New York Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971. To ensure release of most of the content, in June an Alaska Democrat, Senator Mike Gravel, entered 4,100 pages of the papers into the record of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, doing so under the protection of Section 6 of the First Amendment, which states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, [a Senator or Representative] shall not be questioned in any other Place”, meaning that Senator Gravel could not be prosecuted for anything said on the Senate floor, and, by extension, for anything entered to the Congressional Record. It was a provision that allowed the papers to enter the public realm without the threat of a trial or conviction for treason.
The Government tried to gain a ‘prior restraint injunction’ to stop publication, but on June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided, 6–3, that the government failed to meet the requirements of such a restraint. My sometime hero, Justice Black, stated: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” [ii] In fact, the basis of the ruling was inconclusive, relying on a burden of proof argument, but publication went ahead. When Gravel’s request to be free from any prosecution was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court denied the request to extend him any protection because the grand jury subpoena at issue related to a rather technical distinction between the preparation of the materials involved and their later entry into the Congressional Record. Nevertheless, the grand jury investigation was halted, and the publication of the papers was never prosecuted.
It wasn’t the end of the matter for Ellsberg, who was charged in January 1973, under the Espionage Act of 1917, together with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. However, with evidence of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and a defence based on the free speech amendment, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges in May. Later, Ellsberg said the documents “demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates”, adding that he leaked the Papers to end what he perceived to be “a wrongful war”. [iii] To be clear, the man was bound to succeed: back in the 1950s, Ellsberg was a Harvard graduate in economics, and he had spent a year at King’s College, Cambridge, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Unimpeachable credentials!
America withdrew, but what was the aftermath? It took Vietnam half way to eventual unity and peace, but the next stage of the journey was almost as bad as what had preceded it. A year after the fall of Saigon, in July 1976 North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite fears of the massacre of millions of South Vietnamese civilians, it seems no mass executions took place, but in the years immediately after this, many South Vietnamese ended up in re-education camps where some endured torture, starvation, and disease. Local sources claimed more than 400,000 had to register for a period in re-education camps, and while many were released after a few days, others stayed there for more much longer.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez described South Vietnam as a ‘False paradise’ after the war, when he visited in 1980: “The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculous [victims] and more than a million soldiers of the old regime impossible to rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South.” [iv] In the face of this humanitarian disaster, the US used its Security Council veto to block Vietnam’s recognition by the United Nations on three occasions, preventing the country receiving international aid.
Over 3 million people left Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the subsequent Indochina Refugee Crisis. Most Asian countries refused the refugee ‘boat people’. Between 1975 and 1998, an estimated 1.2 million refugees from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries resettled in the United States, with a further 500,000 accepted by Canada, Australia, and France while an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 boat people died at sea. To begin with the boat people were welcomed. They quietly adapted to life in a new country, and worked hard. Vietnamese restaurants were popular. But even in the early years, there was racism: sometimes subtle, but often explicit. Then other migrants arrived, from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and they were the next to bear the brunt of local xenophobia. Today the coronavirus epidemic has stoked up fear of China, and the Vietnamese are back under scrutiny, experiencing the return of racist attacks. Yes, it’s an ever-changing tapestry, but in black and red.
While the US was in the throes of dealing with the Vietnam war, a second major change was taking place in the UK. Ten years earlier, Britain had applied to join the EC, the European Communities, including the European Economic Community, the EEC, and its predecessor, the European Coal and Steel community (the ECSC). That application was vetoed by Charles de Gaulle, the French President. All that support for France in the Second World War had masked de Gaulle’s dislike of and tensions with the UK, and here was the moment of truth. ‘Non!’ Showing the bulldog character that he despised, the UK tried again. A second ‘Non!’
In fact, de Gaulle had two reasons to keep the British out. One was the aftermath of the war years, and his feeling the UK would take the side of the US in any disputes. However, far more critical was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). French farming was inefficient, with over two million farmers, the great majority small and unprofitable, but accounting for 25% of the French economy. The CAP ensure a single market for agricultural goods at guaranteed prices, a Community preference scheme, a protection from imports, comprising an agreement to buy up surplus stocks at minimum prices, subsidising sales on world markets, and imposing levies on the import of cheaper goods from outside the Community (leading the British press to talk about ‘butter mountains’ and the like!). De Gaulle knew that the UK had one of the most efficient farming industries in the world. While it only accounted for 4% of the economy, unprotected British farmers had to sell their produce at world market prices, well below the CAP ones. In contrast, the French government supplemented its farmers from the 1950s by this system of underlying payments. As he saw it, de Gaulle had to keep Britain out to save the CAP.
De Gaulle stepped down in 1969, and with his veto removed, the British tried again This time the application was successful. By then, attitudes to Britain joining the EEC had changed. Now British exports to Europe outstripped those to Commonwealth countries, as had investment. Big business in the UK wanted to be in Europe, while within the EC increasing concern over the growing power of US high-tech companies saw the French change tack. ‘Oui!’
Was it that simple? No, the British were anxious about sovereignty, and sought to ensure it would retain the power to legislate over customs duties, agriculture, and the free movement of labour, services and capital, transport, and access to social security for migrant workers. Was that really an agreement, or more of a ‘maybe’? Negotiations over two years led to an agreement in 1971 (although the formal Treaty of Accession was signed in January 1972 by the UK’s Prime Minister, Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party).
Half way there? The UK’s membership of the EEC came into effect on 1 January 1973. By then membership was already facing opposition from Labour. Peter Shore, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons had already made concerns clear:
“This is a treaty which carries the most formidable and far-reaching obligations. It is a treaty—the first in our history—which would deprive the British Parliament and people of democratic rights which they have exercised for many centuries. I can think of no treaty, to cite only one characteristic of the Rome Treaty, in which the British Parliament agree that the power to tax the British people should be handed over to another group, or countries, or people outside this country, and that they should have the right in perpetuity to levy taxes upon us and decide how the revenues of those taxes should be spent.” [v]
47 Years later, at midnight on 31 January 2020, the UK left. Brexit marked the end of years of squabbles, accusations and bad faith on both sides. Perhaps the British had never really committed to the European Community, not even going half-way there. For certain, if the Common Market was a tapestry of many colours, it had proved impossible to hold.
[i] Robert Christgau, Carole King: Five Million Friends, Newsday, November 1972
[ii] Supreme Court, New York Times Co. v United States, 403 US 713 (1971)
[iii] How the Pentagon Papers Came to be Published, Democracy Now! July 2, 2007
[iv] It’s a devastating piece: The Vietnam Wars, Rolling Stone, May 29, 1980
[v] A clear statement about sovereignty that would reverberate right through the UK’s membership, reported in House of Commons Debates, 20 January 1972, vol 829, col. 681
